CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:
The title "Leaving the Island" refers both to the desire
and the need of making political, aesthetical and existencial borders
more fluid and porous. Geographically, islands are pieces of land
surrounded by the sea, and they are usually conceived as isolated
worlds. In the human imaginary, islands have been mythical allegories
of dreamed paradises, places for adventure and locations to rest
after difficult journeys. But without human beings speaking about
them, islands would be mute, silent pieces of rock and sand. Like
human beings, islands are physical, economical and spiritual geographies.
Water is the matter that sets the distance between islands and at
the same time it is the medium that needs to be traversed to reach
those distant realities. It is a frontier and a means of communication.
Artworks have long been seen as islands that condense meaning and
beauty. Today the notion of the commodified art object linked to
capitalistic ideologies is put into question and art is becoming
a means to create new situations and to connect simbolically different
individuals and communities. The sea is a powerful metaphore of
a fluid and changing medium. Artists can then be seen as producers
of deep streams or superficial movements of the waters. Art can
be a tool to create new ways of navigation.
A new space of confrontation, negotiation and exchange between different
cultures is hence created. It allows us to explore fundamental and
urgent questions from aspiration to a better world in a new millennium
to everyday violence, from social progress to new conflicts between
classes, from globalisation to small events in life.
The three curators of the show - Young Chul Lee, Hou Hanru and Rosa
Martinez- have taken into account the maritim character of the city
of
Pusan as a laborious and rich harbour where different kinds of trade
take place. Relating this to the above mentioned need to erase aesthetical
borders and to provoke new interchanges, they have decided to integrate
their thoughts, their visions and their passions for different international
artists with the goal of creating a unique mosaic in which the frontiers
of who has selected whom are erased. By joining their forces, they
are creating a temporary archipelago in which the artists, like
floating islands, offer to the public their understandings of a
very fast changing present.
In the context of an increasingly globalized world where the power
of the media is commodifing even ideas and attitudes, "Leaving
the Island" wants to update the utopian idea of connecting
art and life, and it expresses the will of shortening the distance
that separates art from other spheres of reality. The modernist
glorification of the autonomy of art is not seen anymore as a sign
of power but as an evidence of its loneliness. The idea of originality
is no longer connected to the individual inspiration of a "genius"
but to the stablisment of collaborative networks of critical interchange.
The meaning and the function of art are being reinvented in relation
to the last scienctific, anthropological and technological developements,
as well as in connection to the global economies that make cities
compete among them.

We conceive exhibitions as open zones and interrelated systems.
This is why we hope that the show "Leaving the Island"
makes of Pusan a meaningful place where the artists and the public
share an atmosphere of aesthetical innovation and ethical concerns;
where they can interchange ideas, emotions and sensations, and where
they can understand a little bit better contemporary social, ethnical,
religious and economical contradictions. Like this, maybe the different
islands become peninsulas related to the rest of the world.